I'm in Europe, while my nameservers are located in the US. If I change my second nameserver to be in Europe, would it significantly improve DNS lookup times?
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No. Yes. No.
No because as I understand it nameserver lookups are often round robin. This means that half of your lookups would be faster. I doubt that this is your intention.
Yes because have a geographically closer nameserver can improve speed. (Stressing the can here since it obviously depends on a lot of factors. It can be faster, it is not always faster).
And finally a no again. DNS lookups are usually cached.So only the first attempt to resolv them matters. Afterward queries should come out of your resolver cache.
Lastly: Which problem are you trying to solve? Your own DNS lookups? Speed for your sites for people globally? Your two line post really does not give enough information.
Hennes
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There are multiple issues you can solve by distributing DNS servers geographically:
- Redundancy/Availability
- Speed
Redundancy will allow you to make sure your data is available in the case of outages of your server or datacenter. More DNS servers will increase your redundancy. Spreading them geographically (and more important, over different networks/AS'es) will increase availability in case of network outages.
For extra speed you could resolve to anycasting (a great read!). This technique will make a host with a single IP address available at multiple locations on the internet and mitigate the round-robin characteristics of DNS. But probably you would like to give this task to a service partner who can handle this for you.
